Tag Archives: bandcamp

It is no question to me… Music is all about expressing myself. So then there is no point to create music if no one would never hear it.

It is of course nice to make some weird recordings for yourself. But… if you can pull it together and make it in to song what you can play in live… thats the real thing.

People do not find your music and you on their own. Especially if you keep material to yourself. Luckily these days social media is there for you. Tricky part is to find right tool for you. There is tool for everything, and most of them can do many things… At the same time the key is to be everywhere at the same time. Nobody, at least I do not, have time to update every single social media platform to get you self published and heard.

So linking accounts come in picture at this point.

Before I tell what I have chosen and how those are linked… few words about different social media platforms…

Facebook:

Nice really nice. It has it all… and more… it knows more about you than yourself. It even have your media without you knowing it. No, seriously it is good, one or maybe the best out there. It has most users world wide so it is important to share you thoughts/media here. It has photo sharing, calendar/event, light forum, apps, groups, you name it… In the end FB is about faces… So it is about peoples. If you do want share stuff about your music (art, or whatever), consider creating FB page for yourself. On this stage it get little messy and not so clear anymore, but anyway you can consider to update your stuff in own topic… and not sharing all those cat pictures also to your art audience.

Twitter:

Possible second largest social media what there is (I did not check facts I assume this). So it is important to be here also. Twitter is quite different than Facebook. Twitter is all about concepts, brands, discussion… read all this in one word #hashtag. So people starts follow you if they find you interesting… they do even might think you even a person… they are all about what you post. Everything is found trough #hashtag not from who is friend of who. Of course this can help you to get found, but is not the point. There is also a limit of how long you tweet (as it is called) and it is140 marks. This of course limits your posting and this is the reason why it is called microblog. There is not so much media features in Twitter than example in Facebook, you can share pictures, but that it pretty much it. Twitter is about sharing short status updates what is going on at the moment.

Google Plus

Yep… no one there… except Google workers and those poor things who has accidentally pressed “create google plus account” while using Google products (email, youtube…).

Blogs:

(many platforms… so many of them… like this worldpress.com on where this blog runs)

You may really want to consider start releasing blog. Specially if you want to tell more about what you are doing and thinking of things. Yep there is no limit on Facebook how long update up can post. But lets face it… Facebook is not about long stories. No one will not read yours page stays update what is like 500 words long (550 words at this point on this blog post). Also on some blog engines it is easy to build it as a website for your self. They are not optimised for that, but probably they will do the thing for you. I am little bit old fashioned about that thing… I think bands/artist needs to have their own website where they can tell more about themselves… like wiki site or introduction of artist, discography, tours etc.

Youtube

As you probably know… youtube is all about videos… If you are going to release some video material go for it. It is surely biggest and most used video service. Also lot of artist releases theirs music in there. It is also very powerful sharing service of your music. So learn to use that and share at least your music also in there, you need to create video to be able to share your stuff in there… but “video” can contain only one picture and music pays trough there… you have surely seen lot of these “videos” in youtube.

Music sharing services

Like BandCamp and SoundCould. There is massive amount of those services out there. Band Camp and SoundCloud might have largest user base. Approach for them is little bit different. There is lot of reviews of those services go check those out and find one for you. I myself are going to use those both. Band Camp for finalised products and for my bands and SoundCloud for goofing around with more weird stuff and not so ready materials. But check those out and find your own.

Photo sharing

Right, you can do this on Facebook and on Twitter. If you do not need anything special you do not need one. But if you are going to post lot of them or you are more in professional photography… seriously do not use Facebook or Twitter. There is lot of good services out there. Instagram is one probably most popular one. It is good no question about that, but it is more for instant sharing: “look I am eating this now”, “I am on stage now”… and stuff like that. If you are about more professional approach look services like Flickr. There is again many services for professionals to share their photo art.. but I suggest that you go and read reviews and try them out… find that right for you.

Okay, now… what I have chosen for myself and why. About me you have to remember that I like to focus on music AND expressing myself. So I like to share what is happening when I am doing this stuff…

Blog, Twitter, Facebook, Band Camp, SoundCloud, Youtube and Flickr… what… yep almost all what I have mentioned earlier in this blog post.

Blog like this blog post, what you are reading, are for more in-depth thinking and how I am seeing things.

This world press blog post goes directly to Twitter when I press publish. Why to Twitter.. because Facebook is page based and FB page tool is not available for my phone… from where I publish 80% of my social media updates.

So as stated I use Twitter as my short updates… “Here I go and this I do” type of things… And yes… every Tweet goes to my FB page. I have my own personal FB profile… but I like to keep it separately. This is not about me… this is about stuff I do. Probably peoples who want to follow that stuff… are not interested other parts of my life, so why kill the audience with dog pictures and stuff like that.. those are for my friends and not about art.

So what about the other services… SoundCould… Yes I am planning to use this as “not so ready” material and for more experimental stuff… and yep, connected to Twitter.

BandCamp for ready songs and albums, not connected. I am not sure if it is possible, but I like to keep it separated. It is for real stuff… If I get something read I have time to promote it properly in all the channels.

Youtube, yes of course connected… I everything I upload gets notified on Twitter.

Flickr… new for me… I have lately get interested about photography, let see if I relase some successfully taken cool pictures… but yes it is connected to Twitter.

The key in here is that Twitter posts everything forward. So what ever service I use it goes to Twitter and Twitter posts it to all other social medias what is about sharing posts. So I just need to do my stuff once (upload or what ever I am doing) and social media gets updated about it.

Probably this would work trough Facebook page also… but to be honest my choice is Twitter because it is just more stylish for me and it provides better support to my mobile devices than Facebook.

Go ahead try different solutions for yourself… use time with them you can get those work best for you and you do not need to spend time on separate social medias just to publish same update many times.